terrytini

2 hours ago, DCJonah said:

It shows why we are in a mess, when meeting that random number on that specific day was a priority. 

Appalling isn’t it ? 

When I see people queuing for chicken, and wanting to visit nail salons, I am filled with dread.

Not just because I have to share a planet with these folk, but because it demonstrates what lies in wait when the various lockdowns are eased.

The level of ignorance, this deep into the pandemic, is staggering. Imagine how much worse people’s behaviour will be when they get what, for many, will be a psychological “ green light” to “ resume their lives”.

I am still talking with family members who don’t fully grasp the potential dangers of occupying airspace recently vacated by an asymptomatic person...reiterating that 6 foot is the MINIMUM distance to keep between yourself and others, .still battling to convince my daughter - (a Medic in the Army !) - that she must wash food packaging and postal items.

Yet they wouldn’t dream of doing some of the unnecessary things many others are doing....which begs the question, how ill informed are ( some) of those doing so ?

Very disturbing possibilities ahead.

6 hours ago, The Fun Factory said:

I have read that Rick Parry thinks that the premier league parachute payments are a evil that need to be eradicated. A couple of points. Firstly if they scrapped them then all relegated clubs would probably go out of business within a couple of years  due to the huge chasm in tv rights between the premier and football league. Secondly I am surprised that   Mr Parry hasn't exploded in a cloud of  hypocrisy  as when he was chief executive of the Premier League he was one of the key players in creating this  as a totally separate product from the rest of the football league, resulting in said massive financial differences. 

Indeed.

Of course if he is genuinely worried that some Clubs get big parachute payments and others don’t, he could seek agreement with his Clubs to share out such payments amongst all.

5 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

...How the **** did he pull that off?

Well, I imagine it was her who pul....., no, no this is a family site...

7 minutes ago, LakotaDakota said:

I would say it's strange that none of you are slating blandy & remarking on his every post for having some common sense when looking at the numbers despite him saying exactly the same as myself & a few others have said.

Maybe because he's a mod?

3 hours ago, bickster said:

And creating the care home death camp network

Yes, very much this. 
I nearly called them that the other day and decided some might find it too much...but that is exactly what they are.

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

From a resident of Hong Kong:

It was possible to manage this situation a lot, lot better than the UK government did.

It’s as simple, and as horrible, as that.

59 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

Is this their way of keeping numbers low. I can't imagine elderly folks in care homes are getting tested on a regular basis.

Quite. 
They definitely are not.

Not only that, but there is no requirement to test for the virus after death, whether in hospital, Care a Home, or anywhere else.

3 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

So went for a test on Monday for Covid, Mrs had one being NHS and I could too being a member of the household. Strange that my Mrs test has come back positive still, even though it's been 10 days since her last test and around 2 weeks since first symptoms. Mine has come back negative even though I had mild symptoms. So did I actually have it, still have the no taste or smell, an why has my Mrs still testing Postive. She was due back at work last Thursday but blagged it and has no symptoms whatsoever??

I’m glad to hear you are both ok at present. And for me, your story here just illustrates how little we still know. 
 

Which is why any action to reopen the Country in the absence of comprehensive testing and tracing is fraught with immense danger.

1 hour ago, markavfc40 said:

It seems that having relaxed their lock down that Germany may have to back track as cases are apparently rising.

We have never been under a strict lock down in UK but the soft lock down we have been under it seems that if not officially that is already being relaxed.

I work as a highways maintenance engineer and for the last 3 and half weeks we had stopped almost all works on the highway aside from safety critical. From next Monday it is all systems go and we will be fully up and running.

I have also noticed whilst out and about, as part of my job, over the last week that the motorway has certainly been getting busier.

I'd imagine unless we get to under 1k new cases a day then test, track, trace is going to be very difficult but I can see lock down measures officially relaxed in a couple of weeks and I would not be surprised to see deaths in hospitals rise again in a couple of months to the levels they were 3 weeks ago. Maybe there is an acceptable level of deaths, as far as the government is concerned, as long as the NHS doesn't become overwhelmed

I have been expecting an easing of restrictions at the end of May, followed by a slow upsurge in cases which, by maybe mid August, will force another, longer (and  tighter, but with more exceptions for business ) lockdown.

What you’ve said there makes me think the easing will be mid May, the upsurge mid June, ( because we will be proportionally less ready) and the next lockdown July.

I hope I’m wrong, but it strikes me as all being ridiculously premature. If we do it right, we may only ( ever) have to do this once. So a few weeks too much wouldn’t be a bad idea. A few weeks too few and God knows where we will end up.

1 minute ago, PaulC said:

I’m sad it was the best comedy show on tv 

Must agree I watched every night and it was very funny, ( but of course it wasn’t at all funny at the same time.)

Im afraid I’m an emotional old sod, and there’s a lot I get maybe too het up over, but that man, and the power he has, and the fact that I share a species with his followers, really turns my gut.

But yes, in its own macabre, dystopian way, it was funny.

Just in case anyone thinks they should hear what the President has to say, here are his next 60 press conferences....

”we did an incredible job on ventilators, nobody ever talks about them anymore, every other Country rings me to say what a job we’ve done on them, we are shipping them everywhere”

”if I hadn’t acted when I did we’d have millions dead”

” I take no responsibility for the deaths or cases”

”the Obama Presidency left everything in a mess”

” the tests are beautiful like you wouldn't believe. All the medics and Governors who say the tests aren’t happening are wrong”

” i can lock everyone down, but it’s not my decision. It’s their decision, but it’s up to me. Everyone should lock down, but those who don’t want to are justified, because we need to end the lockdown. But only when my guidelines are met. Or not. Anyone who we think isn’t following the guidelines we will come down hard. Unless they are Republican. “

” it’s going, and it won’t come back. “

” I created the strongest economy the world has ever seen. And I would’ve got away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids/ virus”

and so on. Sickening, misleading, narcissistic, dangerous, uncoordinated, garbage.

Right. Glad I’ve got that off my chest. 

3 hours ago, DCJonah said:

 

About time.

5 hours ago, mjmooney said:

My son in law's grandmother has dementia and his granddad has been struggling to cope with her at home for a good while. Before the pandemic broke out his granddad had a major health crisis of his own, requiring bowel surgery - so (very reluctantly) agreed to the old lady being moved into a care home. He was still recuperating when the pandemic broke out, and he immediately brought her home. Now at the time, we all thought this was a really bad idea, given their situation. But with what we know now it might well be that he saved her life. 

That is so good to hear

5 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

Are we letting old people die in care homes to keep the numbers at the press conferences down?

If not, why aren't the sick in care homes being moved into hospitals that have capacity to help them?

I’m no expert but I have a little knowledge......one reason is that some of the people in Care have other issues ( eg dementia) and need non medical attention as much as medical attention.

But..

...the main reason, from everything I’ve been told, is more simple. And it’s the same reason as to your first sentence.

Incompetence. 
 

At exactly the time I locked down and advised my family to, (March 10th) my wife, trying to put some of those principles into practice at the Care Home she managed, sought guidance and permissions from Social Care Management. 
I won’t bore people with the details, but she came home that night in tears. She knew, then, we knew, then, that old people ( and not so old, not all in Care Homes are old) were going to die in huge numbers.

It would almost be preferable if they HAD been left to improve the statistics, as that would have at least meant they had featured in somebody’s thinking.

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Very weird to be saying this, but Bernard Jenkin had a good piece on ConservativeHome the other day about the route out of our current situation, and a clear-eyed assessment of what the possibilities are (or, really, aren't) and what the consequences are likely to be.

Bernard Jenkin: Keeping or junking the shutdown won’t work. But the alternative requires a transformation unparalleled since the war

'[...]Talking about the mechanics of re-opening the economy is important in order to understand how and in what order different sectors of the economy can recover. However, such a discussion assumes we can loosen the restrictions while also having in place the public health infrastructure and policies for the whole of society that will prevent a second spike in infections. But that is the daunting challenge we cannot yet meet.

The most helpful way to think about meeting it so to consider the so-called  R number (the average number of people one infected person will themselves infect).

If this number is below one, the number of cases goes down. If it is consistently above one, the disease will spread to the entire population. In the words of Carl Bergstrom, Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Washington: “There’s really not a middle ground. It does one of two things: either you get it under control, and it goes back down to very low levels… or it’s out of control and it keeps getting worse and worse until you get a very large fraction of the population infected.”

So if we re-open the economy, even in a phased way, without keeping R below one, we will merely create a slower form of the disastrous “Surrender” scenario described above.

To keep R below one thus far has taken a national lockdown and the deliberate spreading of fear about the virus. To contain R below one, while opening up, will not be attractive to advocates of a small state.

The task is to reduce how easily people infect each other with Covid-19, despite being far freer to move around and socialise than currently. This requires, in the US or UK, “national government to achieve within three months the sort of pandemic preparedness it took Taiwan five years to develop.”

This is why there is now a debate about whether people will need to wear PPE at all times in public. The scale of the requirement for PPE means that the state will have to be much more involved in the supply chain. There will have to be a comprehensive plan for contact tracing and testing, by which the recent contacts of infected individuals are themselves tracked down and either tested negative or isolated.

To collect high-quality data on where ill people have travelled, and who they have been near, phone apps or similar technology to those used in South East Asia must be widely accepted, and personal data used far more freely than we would normally find acceptable. In order to contain a disease that would otherwise spread freely, we will have to increase daily testing to levels capable of catching outbreaks we would otherwise have no idea about.

No longer would testing be limited to hospitals or symptomatic patients: analysis from E. Glen Weyl (one of the Harvard paper’s authors) and Divya Siddarth, both of Microsoft, suggests that, scaled for the UK, we would need to test not 100,000, but 300,000 people per day if we can accurately identify likely infected people. Otherwise, the testing rate would have to be closer to 18 million per day. Given that we are currently managing less than 20,000 per day, we cannot achieve this any time soon.

When considered together, successfully delivering these public health policies would require a level of Government intervention in the market, or “in society” and intrusion into our private lives, of a magnitude never before seen in the democratic West outside the two world wars.

Whole industries would have to be created or expanded and directed by the state.  Huge sums of money would be spent, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of workers would have to be retrained. We would have to accept restrictions on civil liberties for an indefinite period.'

(from: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/04/bernard-jenkin-keeping-or-junking-the-shutdown-wont-work-but-the-alternative-requires-a-transformation-of-britain-unparalleled-since-the-war.html)

The part before this section is also quite good; the part after is mostly some half-hearted attempt at exculpation for the Conservative Party. However, I think this is a good summary of the reality that actually, the hard work is just about to *start*. The volume of daily testing we will need is more than ten times what we are currently managing. That means we will need massively more people producing the components needed, and delivering, administering and analysing the results. We won't simply need to provide masks for healthcare workers, or even for them plus other essential workers, but enough for everyone in the country to have multiple masks. We will need the contact tracing app to have mass takeup of a majority of the population.

Great Post, great article, and very true.

I hadn’t read it when I posted above about China and about the Right.........but really it’s saying a similar thing as I see it.

The only effective way to deal with this will be massive involvement of Local Authorities, Charities, Tech Firms, Government and much more. 
And the introduction of surveillance, which few will welcome.

All that will have to be in place to enable the leisure, entertainment and other non essential businesses to thrive, and to prevent an overwhelmed Health Service.

Im not confident there is either the ideological will, or the competence, in this Government to do that. ( I mean it’s really what’s been needed for years to tackle the Climate threat, and zilch has happened)

On the other hand, on a positive note, to my knowledge the Regional Groups now active are finding their feet, establishing long forgotten relationships across service sectors, and beginning to have influence. They won’t - hopefully - allow themselves to be quietly broken up just because we get through phase One.

8 hours ago, Genie said:

I said it before but the real China figure must be mega. How many got infected and died before they realised what was going on? Real number must be 100x higher than what they declared.

I understand the concern many express over China’s figures, and don’t want to get in a back and forth, but by way of a different perspective I’d throw in ...

....like many Asian countries they were far better prepared for a virus, mask wearing in urban areas is widespread, and they had a very very tight lockdown - nothing at all like ours -......( for just one example compare their actions on effectively nationalising and taking control of masks in January with us and others still using boxer shorts and tea towels)

...additionally all the reporting from Adidas, Apple and the rest says they’ve seen no evidence ‘ on the ground’ that it was significantly worse ( how truthful they are being ..who knows ?)......and likewise there has been no Intelligence of the sort you would expect if there was widespread massive under reporting of deaths.

Theres no doubt it suits the narrative of the Right to say China must be engaged in a huge cover up - Trump referees to it all the time - so, whilst I’m not denying the possibilities, I’m open to the possibility their reporting is not significantly more inaccurate than ours.

6 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

 

 

Care Homes are completely devastated. Both from virus deaths and other deaths and illnesses which would otherwise be less severe.

No apologies for repeating this over and over.

10 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I have been quite surprised by how many people would shrug and offer up the last 8 years of other people’s lives to be able to ‘get back to normal’.

Normal being sitting in traffic, working in an office, grabbing a costa coffee, shuffling around Primark of a weekend.

I’d want something a bit more inspirational than that to kiss goodbye to a quarter of a million people.

Best Post Ever.

7 hours ago, DCJonah said:

I think a lot voted for tories, knowing full well it meant Boris, a racist clown, would become pm because Brexit would get done. Brexit unfortunately turned into like a sport event, with reasoning out the window and just winning seemly taking over both sides  

Trump continues to be treated as a cult leader because many would rather win with a **** lunatic in charge than let the 'libtards' win. 

I agree there is lots more to it. I just look at the two in charge and can't believe its a coincidence that our death totals will be horrendous. 

 

It isn’t coincidence !!

Both Breitbart backed Koch brother financed Free Market disciples who’s sole philosophy is the destruction of  anything resembling institutions or expertise in favour of entrepreneurs and the free market. Which in this case meant a complete “ hands off” approach until they had no alternative.

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

So who do we play in goal when Pepe Reina refuses to extend his contract? 

Well given how he performed in the last game or two I’m happy giving it a go ?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Residential and nursing homes have no legal responsibility to notify the council (*) about deaths of their residents, although some do - and there are cases when they are also not able to confirm if a death is Corona virus related.

( * they have to notify CQC...who don’t have to tell the Council.)